How To Save Your Pizza Delivery From Financial Ruin
by Rudy Vener
October 22, 2008
There is not much you can do for the nation's economy, but your pizza shop is another matter. Every decision you make about your shop has a direct effect on its bottom line.
That is especially true about your delivery operation. Ever since the "30 minutes or it's free" campaign first hit the pizza eating public, delivery has been a fact of life.
Now, when shrinking customer counts and rising costs are putting restaurants in a fight for their survival, delivery has become a luxury that a hard pressed pizza shop simply may not be able to afford.
But you can't just stop offering delivery. Do that and your customers will go to a competitor who still delivers.
But what can you do?
Every so often, something nice happens. Two delivery orders come into the shop at the same time for two addresses within a few doors of each other. One trip, two deliveries, two tips. What could be better?
If only this happened more often. The good news is that it can! With a few simple tactics, you can encourage these side by side orders and lower the average delivery cost per order.
The first tactic is so simple and cheap it should be a pizza shop's mantra: Drop off menus next door. Every time a delivery driver delivers a pizza, he or she should drop off at least three menus. One to the customer and one to each of the customer's next door neighbors.
What will this accomplish? Obviously it gets more menus into the hands of potential customers, but equally important, the new customers are just a few steps apart. Eventually these neighbors will order on the same night and bingo. Another double.
Handing out flyers to next door neighbors is one of the most inexpensive marketing activities you can do. Your drivers should be made aware that this one simple action on their part is in their own self interest.
Every time they drop off those extra flyers or menus they encourage orders within that neighborhood. They will earn more tips per trip, and they will save more on gas for each delivery.
For the pizza shop this means one driver can deliver more orders in less time.
The next tactic is to increase your delivery time. If you state that deliveries will be made within 30 minutes, that more or less forces you to begin cooking the food immediately and preparing it to go out the door right away. You have a revolving door of orders coming in and going out with no chance to minimize your costs by combining delivery runs.
If another order for that neighborhood comes in fifteen minutes later, it will not get delivered on the same trip.
You can improve on this by increasing your stated delivery time to 50 minutes or an hour.
This way if an orphan delivery order comes in, you can delay preparation for a few minutes and see if a companion order for that neighborhood arrives to keep it company.
If it does, hallelujah! You just cut the delivery cost in half. If not, OK, the customer still gets their food within your stated delivery time.
You can improve the chances of simultaneous orders even more.
Distribute specific flyers or menus for a particular neighborhood or community. The community targeted flyer would promote a special for a particular day of the week or even time of day just for that neighborhood.
Picture a large trailer park that is maybe just a bit outside your normal delivery range. You still want to market to that trailer park, but do not want to send your drivers there on demand.
So you print up a flyer just for that trailer park. The flyer will state up front that you will make only one delivery trip per night at 7:30 and all orders must be in by 6:45 pm. Or you can make two deliveries and any orders placed after 6:45 will be delivered at 9:30 pm. You can easily justify these restrictions due to the distance of the trailer park from your shop.
Since they wouldn't otherwise get deliveries at all from you, the trailer park residents will quickly learn to comply with this schedule and you will get more multiple orders per trip.
By encouraging multiple orders in close neighborhoods in this way you can expand your overall delivery area. With the current cost of gas, customers who are further away are more likely to be willing to wait if they know at the end they will still get delivery.
Food delivery, especially in the pizza market has become an industry standard. By reducing the cost per order with these tactics, you can keep this a viable part of your restaurant's service even in poor economic conditions.
